The next broadband killer: advanced operating systems?

Tue Oct 23 02:39:48 UTC 2007

On 10/21/07, Leo Bicknell <bicknell at ufp.org> wrote:
>
> Windows Vista, and next week Mac OS X Leopard introduced a significant
> improvement to the TCP stack, Window Auto-Tuning.  FreeBSD is
> committing TCP Socket Buffer Auto-Sizing in FreeBSD 7.  I've also
> been told similar features are in the 2.6 Kernel used by several
> popular Linux distributions.
>
> Today a large number of consumer / web server combinations are limited
> to a 32k window size, which on a 60ms link across the country limits
> the speed of a single TCP connection to 533kbytes/sec, or 4.2Mbits/sec.
> Users with 6 and 8 MBps broadband connections can't even fill their
> pipe on a software download.
>
> With these improvements in both clients and servers soon these
> systems may auto-tune to fill 100Mbps (or larger) pipes.  Related
> to our current discussion of bittorrent clients as much as they are
> "unfair" by trying to use the entire pipe, will these auto-tuning
> improvements create the same situation?

I can see "advanced operating systems" consuming much more bandwidth
in the near future then is currently the case, especially with the web
2.0 hype. In the not so distant future I imagine a operating system
whose interface is purely powered by ajax, javascript and some flash
with the kernel being a mix of a mozilla engine and the necessary core
elements to manage the hardware. This "down to earth" construction of
the operating system interface will allow it to potentially be
offloaded onto a central server allowing for really quick seamless
deployment of updates and security policies as well as reducing the
necessary size of client machine hard drives. Not only this but it'd
allow the said operating system to easily accept elements from web
pages as replacements of core features or additions to already
existent features (such as replacing the tray clock with a more
advanced clock done in javascript that is on a webpage and whose
placement could be done by a simple drag and drop of the code
sniplet). Such integration would also open the possibility of
applications being made purely of a mixture of various web elements
from various webpages. Naturally such a operating environment would be
much more intense with regards to its bandwidth consumption
requirements but at the same time I can see this as reality in the
near future....